Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee on AFSPA

The Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee was constituted by the Government of India on 19 November 2004 by the Ministry of Home Affairs to review the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA). Its creation followed sustained civil unrest in Manipur, most acutely the death in custody of Thangjam Manorama on 11 July 2004 and the public protest by twelve Meira Paibi women who disrobed before the Assam Rifles headquarters at Kangla Fort in Imphal with the banner "Indian Army Rape Us." The committee was chaired by Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy, a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, and included Lt. Gen. (Retd.) V. R. Raghavan, P. Subramanian, Dr. S. B. Nakade and Sanjoy Hazarika as members. Its mandate was narrowly framed: to review AFSPA and advise whether the law should be amended or repealed, in light of the obligations of the security forces and the protection of human rights. AFSPA itself draws its constitutional sanction from Entry 2A of the Union List and the Centre's power to deploy armed forces in aid of the civil power.

The committee conducted its inquiry over roughly seven months, holding consultations across the North-Eastern states with state governments, security agencies, civil society organisations, families of victims and legal experts. It submitted its report to the Home Ministry on 6 June 2005. The central finding was unambiguous: the committee recommended that AFSPA be repealed in its entirety. It characterised the Act as a "symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and high-handedness." Crucially, however, the committee did not recommend leaving the affected regions without a legal framework for deploying the armed forces. Instead, it proposed that the essential enabling provisions be transferred into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), so that the powers conferred on the forces would carry a clearer statutory genealogy and be subject to defined grounds and limitations.

The committee's recommended architecture included inserting a new chapter into the UAPA empowering the Union to deploy armed forces to assist the civil power, while building in safeguards that AFSPA lacked. It proposed grievance cells in every district where the forces operate, to receive and process complaints from the public against security personnel. It recommended that the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Tribunal mechanism oversee the use of these powers, and that any deployment be reviewed periodically. The report also recommended modifying the standard of permissible use of force and tightening the conditions under which arrests and searches could be conducted. In substance, the committee sought to retain operational capacity for counter-insurgency while stripping away the blanket immunity and open-ended quality that had made AFSPA so politically combustible.

The recommendations were never implemented. The report was not tabled in Parliament and the Manmohan Singh government did not act on it, partly because the Army and the Ministry of Defence opposed dilution of the legal protection afforded to soldiers operating in disturbed areas. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, in its fifth report "Public Order" (2007), endorsed the repeal-and-incorporate approach. The Justice J. S. Verma Committee in January 2013, examining laws on sexual violence, separately recommended reviewing AFSPA's immunity provisions in conflict zones. AFSPA has since been progressively withdrawn from areas of Tripura (2015), Meghalaya (2018) and large parts of Assam, Manipur and Nagaland, with the Centre announcing significant reductions in disturbed-area notifications in 2022 following the December 2021 Oting-Mon civilian killings in Nagaland.

The Jeevan Reddy Committee must be distinguished from the Supreme Court's own jurisprudence on AFSPA. In Naga People's Movement of Human Rights v. Union of India (1997), a Constitution Bench upheld the constitutional validity of AFSPA but laid down binding guidelines, the "Dos and Don'ts," to constrain its exercise. The committee, by contrast, was an executive advisory body whose findings carried no legal force. It should also not be conflated with the Santosh Hegde Commission (2013), appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate six specific encounter deaths in Manipur, nor with the disturbed-area declaration process under Section 3 of AFSPA, which is a separate executive instrument exercised by the Governor or the Centre.

A recurring controversy is that the committee's report itself was never officially published; its contents entered public discourse largely through a leaked copy and through Sanjoy Hazarika's own writings, raising transparency concerns. Critics from the security establishment argue that folding AFSPA powers into the UAPA would erode the protection under Section 6 of AFSPA, which bars prosecution of personnel without prior Central Government sanction—a provision the Supreme Court addressed in the Extra-Judicial Execution Victim Families Association (EEVFAM) cases from 2016 onward, holding that allegations of excesses are not immune from judicial scrutiny. Human-rights advocates counter that non-implementation has perpetuated impunity in the very regions the committee studied.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant addressing GS Paper III internal-security questions, a desk officer in the Ministry of Home Affairs, or a policy researcher on conflict zones—the Jeevan Reddy Committee is the principal reference point for any argument about reforming or repealing AFSPA. It frames the central policy tension: reconciling operational necessity in counter-insurgency with constitutional guarantees under Articles 21 and 22 and India's commitments under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Citing the committee demonstrates command of the distinction between repeal, dilution, and continuation, and locates the debate within a documented official recommendation rather than abstract assertion.